This month, we headed down to Petaluma CA to talk with Andrew Pryfogle, the SVP of Cloud Transformation at Intelisys, about SD-WAN and how it’s changing the way businesses build their wide area networks. Our co-founder and VP of Sales, Jeff Burchett, was there to help explain why companies are rethinking their network architecture as more and more of their business technologies are moving to the Cloud.

Fortunately for us, the cameras were rolling…

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Video Transcript

Andrew: Hey everyone, welcome to my offices and our whiteboard here in Petaluma, CA. I’m here with the big brain of Jeff Burchett. He’s the co-founder and VP of sales at Bigleaf, one of our go-to SD-WAN providers.

We were having a conversation over lunch a bit ago about the differences in a lot of SD-WAN networks and specifically how this compares with how we’ve always built networks. I thought we’d spend a few minutes on the Whiteboard to describe how the world has changed around this.

Let’s just start if we could Jeff with this: I have site A that I need to connect to site B. In the traditional world, I would do that through some sort of network right where I would connect these locations together in site-to-site networks. These are the kind of things that we do every single day whether it’s site to site or many sites to many sites. I would connect that through point-to-point circuits or frame relay back in the day MPLS, you know, most recently and now this thing Called SD-WAN.

Talk to me real quick and illustrate for our partners why is this network requiring kind of a relook? And how are you guys disrupting this idea?

Jeff: Yeah. So why did we build this network in the first place? We’d build it for the fun of it. It served a purpose. The purpose was at this location you may have three or four important applications, and users at this location needed to access these applications, right? So they used this network to get there. Whether that was as you said point-to-point, frame relay, MPLS, VPN site-to-site, SD-WAN. The value of the network is connecting the remote to the main because the main is where these applications live.

The challenge that we see relative to networks today is this little thing called the cloud that seems to be picking up a little momentum. Yes thing up here.

If you have users here that need access to something here. [Site-to-site] is a great architecture. But the moment this isn’t here and it’s now up here, How do we get there? What does that look like? So common thought would be oh well use the internet. Right? Because the internet can get anywhere to anywhere. The problem is that the internet can be a messy place to play. Oh, yeah. That’s where you need a site-to-cloud architecture, SD-WAN layering over the top of Internet.

It’s so important because what you get is Bigleaf sitting in the middle. So now instead of this architecture going from here to here. What we’re doing is we’re connecting [to the Cloud] via our SD-WAN service.

And then this right here is the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network. This is a purpose-built network that connects to not only this Cloud but to every other Cloud that you and your users need to get to. So these could be applications that aren’t just an application sitting at an Azure or an AWS. You can also be a SaaS application like a salesforce.com.

I think cloud gets broad brushes is everything. But Cloud takes on a lot of different flavors. There is pure play cloud-like as you’re in AWS where you could construct some level of site to site architecture. You take the router that’s here virtualize it put it in as your you now have that path, right?

But the moment you’re not going to a place where you can deploy your own services, right you Salesforce a UCaaS provider, a CCaaS provider, a desktop as a service provider, point of sale in the cloud, electronic health records and cloud-whatever-it-may be. You’re now on SaaS environment where every user at every location needs to get to every different Cloud at all times. That is a site-to-Cloud architecture. That’s the change that we need to think about relative to the cloud. That’s that’s a lightbulb moment. I think for a lot of Partners as they start thinking about how they construct networks.

The requirement from customers has changed is applications of move from print to the cloud and you got to build a network that’s agile enough to keep Pace with the network still has the same purpose. Yeah, of course, it just has to do it a different manner. Yeah. Got it. Got it. I love it man. Great stuff. Thank you very much.

Andrew: Yep.

That’s Jeff Burchett. He’s the co-founder and VP of Sales at Bigleaf, and they’re doing some really cool disruptive things in the Cloud around wide area networking. You should check them out and read their stuff here at ICSU and get smarter about how they’re solving for really unique problems with customers who are embracing the cloud with their applications, and now more than ever need a network that can keep pace with that. Hope that’s helpful. Good selling.